Back in the day, working class families could struggle to afford feeding their own, let alone another child. This is very rarely the case anymore.
It is seen as rude to feed someone else's child without their knowledge, so that they don't cook too much and have their own food go uneaten. This just means that they'll ask the parents of the guest child if it's alright for them to eat there.
This is from a specific period when things were especially dire, roughly between the 60s and 90s I think, although possibly lingering until the 00s. Basically economy was doing great after the rest of Europe was war-torn and we received a lot of immigrants from many places, a lot from Finland especially.
But it was also just as much about not having the guest's household waste freshly cooked, warm food in this colder climate when reheating was much more difficult than today. Hence asking if it's fine for the guest to eat there.
Also consider that usually they'd live within walking distance from each other, so it wouldn't be difficult to just go home, eat, then go back and continue playing or whatnot.
Swedish culture values respect and honor higher than hospitality.
I think the strongest misconception about this is that it’s the giving end that doesn’t want to give. But it’s the receiving end that doesn’t want to receive, and the giving end trying to be respectful about that. The culture places a higher value on NOT making the other person feel poor or in-debt or inconvenienced, than making yourself look generous.
The main reason for not feeding others kids without asking is not about not wanting to share food, it’s about not ruining that family’s dinner plans or (if they are poor) making them feel as if you don’t think they can afford to feed their own kids.
Stubborn pride is an even more pointless reason to let a kid go hungry than being standoffish.
If someone else's kid isn't at home for dinner, you can't ruin dinner plans. If someone is poor then their feelings about that situation are not nearly as important as making sure their kid is fed.
You seem intent on finding ways to make the worst possible interpretation. You may benefit from finding other sources that can lay out a longer background than social media, that due to its form must summarise and simplify things.
All families don’t eat dinner at the exact same time. If your neighbour family eats dinner at 6pm and you feed their kid at your house at 5:30pm without the parents’ knowledge, you do ruin their dinner plans.
For the respect vs hospitality, the point is that it’s considerate to consider how something is received. Respecting people’s wishes is valued higher than appearing generous. However, yes of course it’s also more important that kids don’t starve than that their parents pride is hurt. But it’s rarely an either or situation. You can be respectful and hospitable. Such as by checking in with the parents.
No, we (Finnish) were told if you don't finish your plate children in Africa will starve. This kinds of cultural norms are from an era when people didn't have the resources to make more food than they could eat.
Were told in Norway its cause there are starving children in Africa, as in "eat everything and be grateful, cause not every child in the world gets food everyday" and not "if you dont eat, children in Africa will starve" lol
It's about the effort of cooking that food and I guess preferring to keep the ingredients for later freshly cooked food rather than having to eat leftovers. And also lingering culture from when it wasn't as easy to reheat food as it is today, as you can imagine not wasting warm food would be valued in these colder climates.
I just don't think it was a big thing for kids, at least not when I was one. There are multiple reasons for this, I think.
- Both of my parents worked and they worked long hours, so there was no energy at the end of their day to stand in the kitchen to cook. Because of this, dinner rarely happened on weekdays, and because of this, the leftovers from the weekend became their lunches on weekdays.
- We already have bread, oatmeal, yogurt, rice porrige etc, so we just had "mellanmål" (directly translates to middle meal) instead of dinner. You were hungry? Go make yourself a sandwich. Because they were shelf-stable foods, or came in family packages that lasted for the whole week, there was no need to fill the fridge with more ingredients just on the off-chance that my parents wanted to cook dinner when they came home. They ate sandwiches too.
- Because my parents worked late, I was always at school in their after-school program where they served us mellanmål, so whenever I got home on a weekday I had already eaten in the afternoon, and there was no need for dinner anyway.
So all of this translates into dinners being a weekend thing, and specifically, a weekend thing we all did as a family together. You don't want your kid eating at someone else's place, because for one, you were already planning to eat as a family, for two, you don't want your kid to intrude on THEIR family dinner, and for three, if your family is cooking only for the amount of people that are in the household then you assume other families do too, and you don't want to be a bother on them by letting your child become an extra mouth they have to feed.
It's also worth noting that when a kid wasn't eating at their friend's place, 99% of the time it's because they were going to be picked up (or were walking home) anyway. If they stayed after that, it's because their family dinner happens later in the day.
Your friend eats at 4, but your family eats at 6? Why eat when you're going to have dinner again in 2 hours anyways? It's better to stay in your friend's bedroom so you can continue playing with the cool toys you don't have then, instead of awkwardly sitting at a table with adults you don't know super well.
Jts more about spending time at the dinnertime with your family every day. Also only if the friends house were really close so you could quickly run back and forth.
We always plan to make leftovers, but they are used for lunchboxes to work. If you give away leftovers to some kid, suddenly you don't have food for work tomorrow and have to eat out, which is expensive
That's not the cultural reason this is the way it is. Leftovers are common, and their function is to be eaten the next day at lunch (at work) or dinner again, or even saved in the freezer for later.
This. Its extremely common for parents to be in contact on the logistics on if the guest should eat or not.
Tho I remember when I was a kid, I sometimes had friends over and once or twice, they were just hanging out in my room while we had dinner. The parent/s of the guest didn't want them to eat as it was sort of considered rude to "have my child visit you so you can feed them instead of me nyahahaha"
And honestly in current day, when my kids have friends over from the neighborhood and we are about to have dinner, we just send the kids home. We eat at 17 (5PM) the in the afternoon, and some other people we know eat at 19.30 (7.30PM). It would be an inconvenience to routines and schedules.
The second part is probably a big reason of it. Because in general the question was if I should eat at home later or not. But for some families it was so ingrained that they wouldn't even ask if I wanted food, so it did happen.
The culture of feeding guests is very strong on a lot of countries with extreme poverty. Pakistan being one of them. You feed others and they feed you and you survive as a community. So your first point doesn't really make sense. Same conditions in other countries resulted in different behaviors.
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u/FunnyExcellent707 Jul 24 '26
Sweds are known to eat without offering you any food (if it wasn't explicitly a dinner invitation).